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Letting go...

Author: Alice Bradley

Prompt: Let Go. What (or whom) did you let go of this year? Why?

I have felt for a long while that letting go is one of the dominant themes of my life. This can be great (letting go of resentment, anger, helplessness, fear, all those stupid plastic pieces that clutter up the insides of desk drawers) but mostly, loss is hard. Has been hard.

I lost my third child this year. (We also let go of our first, years before Remy was born.)

This time it was not a choice, to have that very wanted third baby disappear from our lives. This time the choice is to say goodbye with finality and find my peace with grief instead of hanging on or pretending not to care.

And really, I have let go of so much this year and will continue the rest of my days.

"The art of losing isn't hard to master" wrote Elizabeth Bishop, in one of my favorite poems, "One Art". But. It is. And the end of the poem ("the turn") is an acknowledgement of that grief. "(Write it!) disaster. "

We fumble through loss. We lose things, people, places. We lose memories.

We let go when we've reached acceptance. I accept that I will have three babies but only one child in this world. (Unless we decide to foster or adopt later, but it's not looking likely at this moment in time.)

In loss there is (for me) intense grief. In letting go, there is peace. And there is (always, ever) both.